This posting is quite simply a procrastination measure, one that I can scarcely afford. I want to submit my thesis by the end of next week, in time for Easter. I've been writing since October, and I never thought it would take this long or become this frustrating.

It would have been relatively straightforward, if it was not for one particular section in which I have been trying desperately to fit a certain model to the data. It's like a rug which is slightly too big for the room it's in: you get it to lie flat in one place and it pops up in another. What makes it worse is that I cannot get the computer to do it for me. Maybe some computer whizz could do it, but the model has about 12 adjustable parameters and is very non linear. It would take me longer to write a program to do the fit than to do it by hand. So I've been doing this fitting for weeks now. Still, I think that I am just about seeing the light or dim gleam at the end of the tunnel.